Welcome to today’s episode of GSD Daily, it is episode 100. For the past 100 days at 10:00 AM or thereabouts, I have done these and we haven’t covered too many of the same topics, which I’m pretty excited about. This week has been how to make money writing. If you like writing, if you need to generate some income, generate some revenue, there are lots of ways to do it by writing. We’ve been through a lot of them this week. So we talked about freelance writing. We talked about professional blogging, we talked about submitting articles for payment. Today, we’re going to talk about how to become an author and using eBooks and books and things like the way that you’re going to be generating revenue. Now, we’re going to cover some Kindle stuff.
We’re going to cover some Kindle Digital Publishing, KDP, which is what the name of it is and how to become an author. We’re going to talk about some PDFs and whatnot. For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, founder of doneforyou.com. We create offers for our clients. We create sales funnels, and then we create, we do the marketing automation and all the traffic and stuff for clients too. Building the foundation for their business, their digital business. Oftentimes we create products too for them. There have been several instances where we write books for them, or we ghostwrite for them, which is … And we’re always looking for writers. That was kind of some of the inspiration behind it this week was A, we’re always looking for great writers, B, writing is the foundation of every digital business, literally.
Writing is a fundamental building block of the internet.
I mean, whether it’s blog posts, or PDFs, or content, or copy, or email newsletters, or whatever, writing is the foundation for it all, even video. I mean, videos typically need to be scripted, not all the time, but quite often, so that all starts with writing. It doesn’t matter how you kind of slice it up. Writing is a fundamental building block of the internet. Content is king, it always has been. Understanding that you can generate revenue and you have value writing is a key differentiator in realizing that you can break free of whatever shit you’re in and start moving forward online. Many of the business models that we have grown used to have been abandoned in the last three or four months, and they’re not going back to normal.
You might as well embrace it and start moving digitally in writing stuff. There are lots of ways to make money doing that.
Self-Publishing
Today, We’re going to cover Kindle and how to become an author. It used to be that you needed to write your first chapter, submit your manuscript, get approved, or get face 32 rejection letters and ultimately how to become an author. Then self-publishing became more prevalent. There still is like becoming a published author. There still is publishing houses and imprints who will publish your book for you, they’ll market for you. They’ll do all of this stuff, take most of the royalties and will give you 25 cents per book sold or whatever, but more and more and more authors are moving to a self-publishing model.
Advantages
- Author build their audiences online.
- They have a direct relationship with their audience, with their people, with their tribe through social media.
- They can write books, they can send out email newsletters, they can do webinars, they can do so many different things to engage their viewers, readers, whatever.
Self-published authors for the most part are, I mean, they’re just in a much better position financially to reap the rewards of their work and also expand their portfolio of products by putting together coaching offers and digital video courses, as well as paperback books and eBooks and so on. So many of our clients, don’t just have the book. They have the coaching offer, they have the digital course, they have the membership, they have the things that help them spend more or help them make more online, which is awesome. Now, putting together that initial body of work is the challenge. What I tell people often is, don’t overthink it. We kind of start with a mind map or start with a bulleted list and say, “These are your major part titles.”
“Then in those part titles, you’re going to have these subhead headlines. These sub-headlines are going to step a reader through your process or ultimately give the transformation that they are seeking.” You’re writing a book because you have a story, you have a message, outline the book first, or put it in a mind map first. You spend the 60 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, and just put a lot of thought and a lot of brainpower into that text, into what your process is or what it’s going to be. I found that when you do that, when you sit down and you say, “For the next 60 minutes, I’m just going to outline how this book is going to go.”
It doesn’t mean you’re 100% perfect for that time, but if you put together a good outline, then now every time you come back and you sit down to write, you’re not trying to chump, to do the whole book in one sitting. You’re just trying to write a couple of pages that are in that chapter. You can sit down for 30 minutes, you can write a chapter and then tomorrow you can sit down for another 30 minutes and write a chapter or so on and so forth. That’s one of the reasons why so many people start with a blog, so they put … They create their outline for their book, and then they just write a blog entry for each of the chapter titles or each of the sections.
That’s one of the reasons why so many books now are arranged as if it was a blog because a lot of times it starts as a blog. It might be an unpublished blog. It might be something that is kind of trapped behind the login so general readers can’t see it, but just chunking that next day, after day, helps you put together a book in three months, whereas before it wouldn’t even be possible because you’re just looking at this monstrosity of a project and you’re like, “Wow, that sucks. There’s no way I’m going to get to it.”
Chunking
Chunking is key to writing your book or creating a body of work that you can end up selling. Once that’s done, I mean you’re just putting your text inside a word document or an Apple Pages document, or even Google Drive, your Google Docs, I guess. You can just copy and paste everything in there, or you can write from there and then just continue adding to it. If you have a nice table of contents, then you know exactly what you’re going to be doing every day. You start at the bottom, work your way down, or perhaps you’re not necessarily interested in writing about this thing. You want to write about this thing today because it’s prevalent in your life, so you write about that thing, so you’re able to just kind of jump around and pick the chapters that you want to do.
Formatting
Everybody has a different writing style and they’re all good. It’s just about getting shit done. It’s about being productive on it. Once the book is written, or once you have enough of the work that it’s written, then the next step is to format it. If your formatting like Pages or Word Docs or whatever, then, of course, you have your bold and your fonts and all that other stuff, but Kindle has a nice formatting tool that I want to show you real quick.
Publishing
The beautiful part about it is you can export in a Kindle published format, like a Kindle publishing zip file almost, and then it imports directly into Kindle. You can start selling it as an eBook in Kindle or as a paperback in Kindle. Let me show you that real quick, we’re going to jump over.
I’m not sure how this is going to resize because this Kindle Create is like this small … We’re going to play this by ear. This is Kindle Create, it’s a free piece of software. It integrates with your Kindle account, your Amazon, your kdp.amazon.com account, which is just your Amazon login. You can do two different things like for … I did ours… This book in … So this book is done in this Kindle Create. It’s got full cover graphics and all this other stuff. This textbook is for sale on Amazon. Then I did this paperback. I did the Kindle version in this Kindle Create too. I’ve used this quite a bit. Kindle Create, if we go to resume an existing project, so we’re going to create a new project file. I just want to show you this.
Walk Through on Using the Kindle Create
We’re not going to create a new file. I’m going to go to an existing file and show you some of the tutorials and stuff or not tutorials, but show you some of the capabilities. Right now, you can do a novel, essay, poetry, narrative, or nonfiction book. You can do a comic with a guided view, or you can do textbooks, travel guides, cookbooks, and music books. Like this when I published the Kindle version, I selected this top one. This is like narrative nonfiction. Then when I did this one, I selected the textbook travel guide, because I wanted it to be color and I wanted it to be big. I wanted it to be a big document or like a big book, a big binding.
Then you just select which one you want. You’re up here, your novel essay, poetry, this you’re going to upload a doc or doc X file, which you can export. Yeah. You can export from Google or you can export from Google Drive or Microsoft Word. If you are uploading a textbook or travel guide, it’s just a PDF. You don’t have editing capability when you export a PDF, it’s just how it works. They don’t have that functionality yet because they want to make sure that when they print the file, the images and everything line up where they’re supposed to, it just gives … Then if you’ve ever read anything in Kindle, you know how it kind of moves some of the text around. Sometimes the formatting gets a little weird.
All right, so we’re going to cancel this. We’re going to open a project so you can see what the inside of it looks like. All right, and it opened a window. All right, so we’re going to go here. There we go. All right, so let’s look at … Let’s see if this one opens up, might not open up. We might have to start a new one.
All right, so we’re just going to start a new one. We’re going to upload a novel essay, poetry, or narrative, and we’re now going to choose a file. Just real quick, Let’s see, what do I have on my desktop here that we can kind of mess with? Oh, here’s one. This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to see this PDF here in a little bit. It’s just something we’re working on, but basically what it’s doing is I uploaded a doc file and it is converting it into a … It’s going through and it converted it into a Kindle-oriented file. I’m going to scroll down. All right, so the import has been successful. We’re going to continue and then I need to change my screen here. It keeps moving over. I got three monitors here and it keeps moving over to the next one.
We’re going to accept selected. This is the screen that it opened, and this is probably really ugly for you right now, but let’s do this, it’s an Automated Webinar Playbook. This is a PDF that we’re going to be putting together. It’s going to be like a third journal, a third checklist, and a third tutorial. I’m pretty excited about it. We’re just putting it together and designing this stuff at the moment, but we’re going to use it as a lead magnet and also, just a kind of a training tool. What we can do with this is we have very, very simple font kind of editing tools. We can go through, and this is going to be a chapter title, and we can have … This is the chapter subtitle let’s say.
Then we have our paragraph text and what this does is when you format it in the Kindle language, then Kindle, the Kindle reader can move it around and make sure that it appears on a Kindle device, the way it’s supposed to. It also makes sure that when you print that as a PDF, you can expand the sizes and stuff, and then you’re all good. You have your basic, kind of have like a view window. Having some updos, you can insert different pages and stuff. This isn’t like a full-blown text editor though. What they’re trying to do is this is the last 2% of formatting to make it look great on a Kindle device. It’s a lot of font stuff you can change, you can change to a subheadline, a blockquote, there are all kinds of … There are separators and stuff.
What it’s trying to do is standardize your text so that then Kindle can interpret it. Then what you’re doing is once you’re happy with it, you can export, so you publish it, and then it creates … Let me switch the window again. I think this is a window. Yep, so now you can export it. Your project has not yet been saved but you can hit okay. Then we’re going to save the project onto our desktop, and there we go. Now, we can upload it to Kindle. That’s kind of how you would end up formatting it nicely.
Then after you export it, we’re going to switch the screen again. We’re going to go into …
We’re going to go into, here we go. All right, we’re going to go into Amazon Kindle Digital Publishing. You can set-up necessary controls for your book here. Both your paperback books and your Kindle books. Here we have three. I got three books here. There’s funnel factor, there’s create, and then there’s convert. You can set your pricing here. You have your Kindle eBook pricing, as well as your paperback pricing. Then you can promote and advertise the books here as well. It used to be that all the paperback stuff was done on a website called Create Space. Amazon acquired Create Space quite a while ago. They had paperback publishing tools, which were nice. The first book I had them publish like I had them do the design cover and it was like 800 bucks or something.
They formatted the text real nice, did the cover, and all that other stuff. It was a nice service. Then then the tools just got so good that you could just publish on your own, like this. You can write the document. You can format the document as a Kindle thing. Then you can upload that document into KDP.amazon.com and all you have to do when you want to create a new book, you just log in, you want to create a Kindle book or paperback. You just follow the prompts. It takes about half an hour. You upload your document, you preview the document, you make sure that it looks good on a Kindle device. It takes usually 24 or 48 hours for approval. I think somebody at Amazon headquarters goes through and also make sure that a reader’s going to have a great experience reading it.
Your book gets approved and is live on the marketplace and you can start selling it. It is a very, very nice seamless process. It is not hard to do. Then having a book gives you the credibility that sometimes you’re looking for, it might put you on stage. It might make what you do more credible from a customer client standpoint. The book is never something you’re going to get rich on. You know that though like how to become an author, you know you’re never going to get rich in the book, the book opens doors that might not be open to you otherwise. It also lets you have authority in the marketplace. You can sell your courses, you can sell your coaching and all that other stuff.
The book is a gateway to get where you want to go. You’re going to make some money with books too. It’s just not going to be a whole lot, even published, even self-published, your book might end up generating three bucks, four bucks per sale. Let me go look at this. Let me share my screen again. If we go into like Create here, we’re going to go look at the eBook. Edit eBook pricing, so I just want to show you what the numbers end up looking like. This particular eBook is $14.95. My royalty is $5.23, so I mean, I make $5 per purchase. It isn’t a barn burner by any means. Let’s look at the Kindle. Let’s look at the paperback version, which has less, of course, because they have to print it, so here’s the edit book pricing.
This paperback is $19.95. My royalty is $4.18 for expanded distribution and $8.17 if not on expanded distribution. All in all, it’s not much, so writing a book is about the gateway. It’s about getting you on bigger stages if that’s what you want. It’s about selling additional products and establishing yourself as an authority. It is going to make you some money, but it’s about all of the things that are next in your world. If you have any questions at all, or would like to talk about building a sales funnel, putting together these offers, figuring out what a membership site would look like or a coaching program would look like for your business, just go to doneforyou.com/start. Fill in the little application, schedule a call with my team.
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com and then click the click, the little chat box in the lower right-hand corner, and we will get back to you ASAP.
